Don't Be Shy 28

“Did you think you would be the hero when you grew up?” Lena asked.

“I never thought about growing up when I was growing up. It just sort of happened.”

“When I was a kid, I thought I’d be a hero. Then, when I was growing up, I thought I’d be a good person. Now…” Lena shut her eyes. “I shouldn’t like the things I like. I shouldn’t do the things I do with you. It’s not normal.”

“The things we do make you happy. That’s not nothing. What’s so great about being normal if it doesn’t make you happy?”

Lena shook her head. “You think it makes me happy, paying someone five thousand dollars to hold my hand?”

“I’m not doing this because you’re paying me.”

Lena said nothing. The teapot was whining now and Kara left to get it before the neighbors complained. She set down a cup of tea on the table, then a bowl of chicken broth, then she made a quick cucumber sandwich, cut in half with one slice for her and one for Lena.

“I think I will have the light off,” Lena said.

Kara turned it off and they sat in the dark, in the light from a window that was barely enough.

“The man I work for… I have this job…”

Lena fell silent and stayed silent for long moments, until Kara pushed her plate closer to her.

“Eat,” she said.

Lena took a few bites of her sandwich. Drank some tea. She lowered her spoon into the broth, but only stirred it some.

“Someone goes to the hospital. They get an operation. To get that operation, they have to be cut open, their bones are broken, they have tubes shoved down their throat… but it has to happen. So the people who are a part of it, who clean it up, who stitch up the wounds, even who make the incisions. They’re doing something good. Because it has to happen. And it’d be worse if they didn’t do what they did.”

“What has to happen that’s worth you feeling this way?” Kara asked.

Lena forced a grin and was surprised when the edge of her lips didn’t meet the mask. Oh yes. It wasn’t there. She worried she’d look ghoulish, trying to push a smile into her voice this way, but with the mask off, it hardly mattered. She looked monstrous enough already.

“I do wish I could do something else… sometimes… but it’s what I was meant for. What I deserve. And I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Maybe you don’t want to, but this is the first time you’ve stopped shaking since you walked through the door.”

Suddenly Lena needed her mask. She didn’t need to eat, she didn’t need to drink, she just needed to be covered up. She took it and she held it to her face and she tried to put the straps into position, but her hands were shaking—Lena stopped. She took a deep breath. Kara was looking at her. That made her feel scared and calm all at once.

“I need a shower,” she said. “You can put the food into the refrigerator.”

***

“I do pro bono work,” Lena said, under the scream of the shower and the hiss of steam up from the tile floor to swirl through her senses and make everything a relief. Not so dirty, not so achy, just blissful heat and cleanness. “And the work that supports my pro bono work. There was a retiree who’d planted an oak sixty years ago and his neighbor was trying to get the city to chop it down—I stopped that. There was a girl… twelve-year-old girl… she started hanging out with a gang, not doing anything illegal, just following them around, and the police… the police…”

She tried to picture herself saying this to Kara and her justifications faltered. She could lie to herself, she was good at it, but Kara—it’d been so nice to have Kara care for her. Make sure she was fed and warm and safe. Giving a damn if she was alive or dead. But Lena didn’t think she had enough excuses in the world to make a difference if Kara knew the truth.

She took the showerhead and rinsed the suds off her body, before picking up the bar of soap again and beginning to wash once more.

***

Kara didn’t want to disturb Lena’s privacy; that was clearly the first commandment of Lena Luthor. But she also didn’t want Lena to slit her wrists and bleed out while she was being respected from afar. Not that Kara thought she would do that after one bad day… but how well did she really know Lena? The woman made herself unknowable.

Kara padded closer to the bathroom door, ready to bolt at the sound of the knob turning. She listened to the shower run and lost herself in it, thinking of the feel of the water on her own skin and trying to imagine how it would feel glazing Lena’s flesh. Did she wear the mask in the shower, the spray rattling on it like rain on an old window? No. Surely not. It wasn’t the mask Lena was drawn to, Kara didn’t think, it was the negation of it. She didn’t want to be seen for her ugliness, maybe not even her beauty. What did she want to be seen? Did she want to be seen at all? She had to want that—why else was Kara here?

I wonder if there’s a prostitute on Earth who’s this worried about her john? Kara shook her head. That wasn’t all Lena was to her. Lena had been concerned for her, cared for her… befriended her. Okay. And she paid Kara to have sex with her. Kinky, degrading—ridiculously satisfying—sex. Did that preclude the friendship? There had to be accountants who were friends with the people they did taxes for. Not that it was the same thing, at all…

Kara had always taken stories about situationships and friends with benefits and throuples with a grain of salt. They seemed to her like the exaggeration of perverted magazine writers and people in Los Angeles. Maybe one percent of one percent of people had a fuckbuddy, so a writer desperate to be edgy put it into their TV show and convinced everyone that it was the latest trend. Yeah, Kara had grown up during the moral panic over rainbow parties. If there were any, she’d never been invited to any and she’d never met anyone who would want to go to one.

But what the hell was her and Lena’s thing if not… something?

This was about more than just money. She enjoyed her… work. But if she didn’t need the money… did she need the money? How much of a nest egg must she have before she got an apartment, got a job, started a real life? And if she had a real life, would she still be opening her legs to whatever kinky thing Lena wanted to do?

Would she be standing outside her bathroom while Lena took a shower, listening for any sign of distress, willing Lena to be okay?

The shower turned off. Kara rushed, as quietly as possible, over to the couch. She sat down and tried to look natural. There was a TV Guide between the couch cushions. She snatched it up and pretended to read. It was from 2016. Yeah, that tracked--Lena probably didn’t even have cable now, just enough streaming services to sound like a toddler’s first words. Hulu! Freevee! Guuji! Jonso!

I should write some of these down in case I ever need to name a character in a Star Wars fanfic.

Lena came out with a bathrobe on. She’d wrapped her towel around the lower part of her face.

She’s ridiculous, Kara thought. She was still smiling to herself. I love how ridiculous she is.

“That must be the funniest TV Guide ever published,” Lena observed.

“I was thinking about streaming services,” Kara told her.

“Really? That always depresses me.”

She walked to her bedroom, Kara watching her. First for any sign of distress, then just to be watching her. Her long legs crossing the floor like scalpels cutting through skin. Her thighs flashing out from beneath the hem of her robe, pale but not seeming devoid of anything, undernourished—more like a canvas of expensive material, just waiting to embrace watercolors, ink, graphite, whatever Kara used on it. Her lips parted as she pictured the flush of red that might go through that milky flesh. It struck her imagination like lightning jumping around inside a dark cloud.

It occurred to her that, for all they’d done together, she’d never seen Lena naked. Barely even undressed. Always in a shirt, trousers, this or that. It was what Lena wanted and God knew half the turn-on was what Lena wanted… but how Kara stared. She knew what she was seeing, not seeing, was worth staring at.